In 2005, while walking through the Frieze Art Fair in London, I
detected the distinctive whiff of fresh popcorn. I remember
thinking it must be coming from the snack bar, but on turning into
the next booth, I was confronted with a monumental artwork: a skip
(in the US we’d call it a dumpster) filled to the brim with popped
kernels. It turned out that this was a work by the Mexican artist
Gabriel Kuri. My immediate reaction was: how very art fair. The
beckoning but sickly scent; the explicit reference to mass
entertainment; the inevitable onset of staleness; the sheer
grandiosity and absurdity of it. Kuri had created the perfect
emblem for an art world given over to commercial spectacle. More
recently, I encountered a sculptural use for popcorn a second time,
at Art Basel Miami Beach in 2011. This time the popped kernels gave
off no smell. That’s because they were made of porcelain, coloured
by hand to look like the real thing. They were also a bit
oversized, and were arranged in rows hanging from the ceiling that
together described a serpentine river of salty snacks. The
installation was by the Californian artist Pae White — and I was
smitten right away. If I had smiled ruefully at Kuri’s arch gesture
about the current condition of art production and viewership, and
then moved on quickly, when I saw White’s work I giggled and wanted
to linger. The jaded, seen-it-all frame of mind that sets in so
easily at art fairs drained away for a little while. In its place
was the joy of finding something trivial made into something
wondrous.

It’s a

Footnotes

All quotations come from a conversation with the
artist, 1 September 2012.↑